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kilobug comments on Existential Risk - Less Wrong
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There aren't enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world, not by a long shot. There aren't even enough nuclear weapons to constitute an existential risk in and off themselves, though they might still contribute strongly to the end of humanity.
EDIT: I reconsidered, and yes, there is a chance that a nuclear war and its aftereffects permanently cripples the potential of humanity (maybe by extinction), which makes it an existential risk. The point I want to make, which was more clearly made by Pfft in a child post, is that this is still something very different from what Luke's choice of words suggests.
How many people will die is of course somewhat speculative, but I think if the war itself killed 10%, that would be a lot. More links on the subject: The effects of a Global Thermonuclear War Nuclear Warfare 101, 102 and 103
"Destroy the world" can mean many things. There aren't nearly enough nuclear weapons to blast Earth itself, the planet will continue to exist, of course.
The raw destructive power of nukes may not be enough to kill most of humanity, yes. Targeted on major cities, it'll still kill an enormous amount of people, an overwhelming majority of the targeted country for industrial (ie, urban) countries.
But that's forgetting all the "secondary effects" : direct radioactive fallouts, radioactive contamination of rivers and water sources, nuclear winter, ... those are pretty sure to obliterate in the few next years most of the remaining humanity. Maybe not all of us. Maybe a few would survive, in a scorched Earth, without much left of technological civilization. That's pretty much "destroy the world" to me.
This survey's median estimates rate nuclear war as ten times as likely to kill a billion people in the 21st century as to cause human extinction: http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0020/3854/global-catastrophic-risks-report.pdf
How many of the respondents had any specific expertise on nuclear wars?
A handful, who had given presentations to the rest of the group with discussion. Also climate folks.
Do you know anything about what their estimates were?
Not broken out.
The article says "There are enough nuclear weapons around to destroy the world several times over". That suggests some kind of clear-cut quantitative measure, and does not describe the actual situation.